What's the give, what's the get?
What’s the give, what’s the get? What you have to ask yourself is: what can you offer that they need? What do they need from you and what do you need from them? How can the two of you work together?
Cross Promotion
I want you to think about 10 vendors in your niche. Seniors, families, weddings, children, other, cupcake, it doesn’t matter. Insurance agents, real estate agents. What are 10 vendors that you can come up with?
If you’re struggling right now to understand what I’m saying to you, think about seniors. You’ve got:
- hair and makeup
- limo companies
- dress companies
- venues where they host prom
- Flower shops
I just named off five categories of vendors that you can go after. Each one of those categories is going to have a plethora of choices for you. Same for families, for weddings, for children. So for the booklet I just showed you, I looked at weddings and I identified 10 venues that I wanted to work with that host weddings.
So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to reach out to 10 vendors and I want you to understand that you are going to get told no by eight. Hell, you’d be happy if you got told no by eight. Eight are probably just not even going to respond to you. It’s just how it works. So don’t take it personally.
So you’ve got to have a plan. You cannot just call or email. Don’t just call them up and ask to do business with them. They don’t want to hear from you. They’re salespeople. They got their own shit that they’re selling. What you have to do is get them in a meeting.
The ultimate goal is to get to the face-to-face meeting.
Face-to-face is how business is done. Why? Take a second and think about this. You live in the same world that I live in. You’re being inundated with people asking you for stuff all the time, whether it’s family, whether it’s friends. I get emails every day, somebody asking me for something.
But when I get to a meeting, maybe somebody’s taking me to lunch or a coffee and I’m having that face to face meeting, it’s received completely differently than if it’s somebody just sending me an email asking me for something.